by Carolina Sculti // Feb. 3, 2026
Egill Sæbjörnsson is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice bridges visual art, music, performance and architectural interventions. Since the mid-1990s, he’s expanded the language of painting and sculpture through his integration of technology, producing works that range from intimate museum installations to large-scale, permanent architectural projects. Born in Iceland and now living and working in Berlin, New York and Reykjavik, his work combines generative video projections with physical objects to create environments that shift between the digital and physical, material and mental realms. Often using humor, play and world-building, his practice probes philosophical questions around human existence and our relationship to our surroundings. In addition to installations, Sæbjörnsson has produced publications, lecture performances and workshops that explore the conceptual frameworks underpinning his work.
‘My Friend the Art,’ Sæbjörnsson’s large-scale solo exhibition, which is curated by Silke Calmer Dinesen and will soon open in Denmark at Nordatlantens Brygge, proposes an alternative framework in which art is understood as a form of evolutionary life developing alongside humanity. Art is reimagined as a force capable of generating joy in collaboration with humans, instead of existing as an object created for passive consumption. Featuring works by Sigríður Björnsdóttir, the Icelandic pioneer of art therapy, the exhibition also explores the healing qualities of art, emphasizing sensory experience, participation and play as key elements for developing new ways of relating to the world and to each other.
Egill Saebjornsson: ‘My Friend the Art,’ 2026, PR image for the exhibition ‘Egill Sæbjörnsson – My Friend the Art’ at The North Atlantic House, Copenhagen, crayon on paper with AI // Courtesy of the artist
Carolina Sculti: Much of your work focuses on dissolving the imposed boundaries between “living things” and “inanimate objects.” How do you personally understand the life of objects?
Egill Sæbjörnsson: Well, in my two lecture performances ‘From Magma to Mankind’ (2020) and ‘Object Species’ (2021), as well as in my book ‘Stones according to Egill Sæbjörnsson’ (2012), I started formulating verbally things that I have been thinking about and directly and indirectly dealing with in my artworks since the 1990s. In ‘Stones according to Egill Sæbjörnsson,’ I made an attempt to erase the line between living beings and dead objects. I even went so far as to draw a new lineage of the origin of life, basically saying that it never started, but rather that everything is equally dead and living at the same time. What we are rather dealing with is an outdated concept; that life started at some point, usually dated to the first single cells. If we stop talking about living beings and dead objects and put everything under the same umbrella of being different kinds of structures or constructs, we acquire a new paradigm, which helps us reposition ourselves differently in the world. The constant search and quest for “life in space,” the search for life on Mars or Jupiter, is, then, an incorrect point of departure and a waste of time and money. Instead, we could start developing our ideas about the complex mechanisms of the world, where the concepts living and dead are irrelevant. The life of objects is therefore not about ontology or about humans projecting human properties onto dead things, as in old folklore, but rather about staring at the world directly and seeing it as something that is neither dead or alive, but rather as something that is beyond that. We need to develop that vocabulary.
Egill Sæbjörnsson: ‘A Macho Sculpture from the 80s & A Macho Sculpture from the 50s,’ 2023, generative video projection made with Unity 3D game engine, sculptures made of plaster, styrofoam and wood, installation view from the exhibition ‘Egill Sæbjörnsson & Endless Friends of the Universe’ at The National Gallery of Iceland 2023/2024 // Photo by Sigurður Gunnarsson, courtesy of the artist
CS: In your upcoming exhibition ‘My Friend the Art,’ you understand art as an “Object Species” developing alongside humanity. How did this idea of an object species first emerge for you, and what does it change about how we relate to artworks?
ES: In the work ‘From Wall to Wall’ (developed with curator Karolin Tampere) from 2008, I remember first talking about artworks as “radios that transmit information 24/7.” The work is about two walls in an exhibition space, which talk about the works in the show and about the visitors attending it. Also in the work ‘Stone’ (1998), I tried to portray a large rock on my family’s farm as a “mass that radiated so much presence that it felt like a personality.” Then again, in the book ‘Stones according to Egill Sæbjörnsson,’ I posed the question directly on the book’s cover and inside the book; “Is Art a Species?” The term “Object Species” is a term I came up with to describe entities that develop through reproduction and where we can see a continuity of development. Such entities or Object Species can be things like “chairs,” “string instruments,” “literature,” “music” and last but not least, in my case, art. In short, art is a species that walks with humans, similar to a dog, and art continues affecting and shaping humans in the same way that humans continue to help reproducing and developing art.
Egill Sæbjörnsson & Karolin Tampere: ‘From Wall to Wall,’ 2008, two-channel video projection, film, animation, sound and found objects, exhibition view HISK, Gent, Belgium // Photo by Anu Vahtra, courtesy of the artist
CS: The exhibition also reflects ideas from art therapy and practices of healing. How does your understanding of healing shape the relationship you imagine between humans and art?
ES: My ideas about the healing properties of art come from the years I did art therapy with Sigríður Björnsdóttir. That was in 1989, when I was about 16-years-old. I was so fascinated by her work and how it felt attending her sessions that I thought that was the future of art. Art as a modality of care and healing was not a concept that one read about in art magazines at that time. It has only been in the last couple of decades, even less, the last 10 years or so, that one has started seeing contemporary artists working similarly to Sigríður. She is a guest in the exhibition and we are showing eight of her most recent drawings using water color crayons.
So, if art is a species—a non-human, non-living creature, to use old world terms—then it is a remarkable space where color and drawing, shapes and processes, have profound effects on us. When Sigríður was developing art therapy (she is one of the few pioneers in the world, who started in the 1950s), she put emphasis on the psychological results for the person making the drawing rather than on making a “good drawing” or an intelligent artwork, something groundbreaking that would make its mark on so-called “Art History.” The works that people make in art therapy might never be hung in the Centre Pompidou or the Louvre, and might be of no value for today’s art market, but they mean everything for the person making the work. So this relationship between humans and art is something Sigríður practiced throughout her career, starting in 1952, and was rather seen as a medicinal practice than an art practice. I find this relationship so remarkable that I often shed a tear when I go to art exhibitions: I feel a tremendous beauty in it and I sense a creature that has its presence behind all the artworks interacting with us. In a way, it takes the focus away from being a great artist, away from the genius, the unique artist, that is a concept that started developing in the Renaissance when artists started putting their name on their artworks, in order to make a personal career with goods that they could sell.
Instead, basically, Sigríður de-weaponized the urge for genius and found a way to put the power of art back in everyone’s hands. I have, jokingly, posed the question: “Who is the greatest genius of art?” and given the answer: “art itself”. I see art as something standing inbetween, that all of us take part in developing and shaping throughout millennia. No one really discovers so much, it’s rather the group that discovers it somehow together, and in the middle stands art, like a giant, if we like, which we interact with. Of course, it’s more complex than that, because art and humans don’t stand separate from other things. The power of the mind and quantum physics are related to all this. Art is not the center of the universe, nor are humans. We are a part of something much larger.
Egill Sæbjörnsson: ‘The Drawing Corner,’ 2019, wooden furniture, sculptural elements on a wall with animated video projection and sound // Commissioned by Friends with books – art book fair, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, curated by Vanessa Adler & Savannah Gorton, courtesy of the artist
CS: Humor and play seem to always have been central to your work. Why are these qualities so important to you when asking serious or philosophical questions?
ES: For me, humor is a way to open things up. When I was in the music world, I heard someone say: “the front-person of the band has to dress up and look good, because if the audience doesn’t like the music, at least they will like the look.” So if people don’t relate to some deeper aspect of the artworks, it’s always good if they can at least laugh a bit. I also know that I don’t know fully what I am doing in my art, simply for the reason that art itself, as a creature, is doing so much every time I instigate the production of an artwork, and that there are so many forces participating, ideologies and connections with other artworks that I am not aware of, so that probably 80 percent of what is happening during the making of the work is simply passing through me.
CS: What do you hope your audiences will take away from the experience of relating to art as a friend?
ES: A positive outlook on the world: that we are powerful beings who can deal with reality in a positive way.
Exhibition Info
Nordatlantens Brygge
Egill Sæbjörnsson: ‘My Friend The Art’
Exhibition: Feb. 7-June 7, 2026
nordatlantens.dk
Strandgade 91, 1401 Copenhagen, Denmark, click here for map
